ed to Jack--here--last fall."

"You--married! To JOHN DUMONT--you, only seventeen--oh, Pauline--"
And Olivia gave way to tears for the first time since she was a baby.

Scarborough was neither at supper nor at breakfast--Pauline left
without seeing him again.

VIII.

THE DECISION.

When the sign-board on a station platform said "5.2 miles to St. X,"
Pauline sank back in her chair in the parlor-car with blanched face.
And almost immediately, so it seemed to her, Saint X came into
view--home! She fancied she could see the very house as she looked
down on the mass of green in which the town was embowered. The train
slid into the station, slowed down--there were people waiting on the
platform--her father! He was glancing from window to window, trying to
catch a glimpse of her; and his expression of almost agonized eagerness
made her heartsick. She had been away from him for nearly seven
months--long enough to break the habit which makes it impossible for
members of a family to know how they really look to each other. How
gray and thin his beard seemed! What was the meaning of that gaunt
look about his shoulders? What was the strange, terrifying shadow over
him? "Why, he's OLD!" The tears welled into her eyes--"He's gliding
away from me!" She remembered what she had to tell him and her knees
almost refused to support her.

He was at the step as she sprang down. She flew into his arms. He held
her away from him and scanned her face with anxious eyes.

"Is my little girl ill?" he asked. "The telegram made me uneasy."

"Oh, no!" she said with a reassuring hug. "Where's mother?"

"She--she's got a--a--surprise for you. We must hurry--she'll be
impatient, though she's seen you since I have."

At the curbstone stood the familiar surrey, with Mordecai humped upon
the front seat. "I don't see how the colonel ever knowed you," said
he, as she shook hands with him. "I never seen the like for growin'."

"But YOU look just the same, Mordecai--you and the surrey and the
horses. And how's Amanda?"

"Poorly," replied Mordecai--his invariable answer to inquiries about
his wife. She patterned after the old school, which held that for a
woman to confess to good health was for her to confess to lack of
refinement, if not of delicacy.

"You think I've changed, father?" asked Pauline, when the horses were
whirling them home. She was so busily greeting the familiar streets
and houses and trees and faces